“Dirty Cleans”: 조이스, 음란성, 그리고 검열

This paper deals with the problem of censorship in regard to Joyce’s Ulysses, not only in his time, but also in our time. The Throwaway Horse Project initiated a series of webcomic versions of Joyce’s Ulysses. It became so famous that the Apple company allowed the iPad version of this webcomic to be sold only if some part of the obscene descriptions were modified. In the end, the Apple company was forced to succumb to the protest.
The serialization of Ulysses in the Little Review through Ezra Pound was suppressed because of its obscene contents in America. The New York Society of the Suppression of Vice waged a crusade against obscene literature, which is supposed to smudge the innocent minds of the young. In 1935, Judge Woolsey’s decision salvaged Joyce’s Ulysses from being condemned as obscene. But it is true that Joyce must have intended to include obscene materials in his work. Why? The answer is: Joyce must have been aware of the dominance of pornography along in commodity culture.
Joyce’s inclusion of pornographic novels and erotic picture cards makes his work ‘obscene,’ which strategically undermines the edifice of Victorian discourses of purity and hygiene. Joyce tries to be honest about his sexual desire, which is embodied through a character, Leopold Bloom, whose sexual perversity is supposed to be embraced as ‘normal.’ Although so many characters in ‘Circe’ denounce Bloom’s perversity, they reveal their own sexual fantasies. In a scene of hanging the Croppy Boy, a kind of metamorphosis of Robert Emmet, a radical nationalist, those ladies in the high society of England run to sob the sperm emitted by the hanged man. By scattering pornographic novels and erotics pictures throughout Ulysses, Joyce attempts to show his awareness of the transition of sexual discourses and criticizes the repressive hypothesis of the period in which he lives.
Joyce deploys obscene materials as a Trojan horse to attack the Victorian idealization of prudence and reticence about sexuality. He must have been aware that the distinction between high culture of classicism and popular culture of pornography will be blurred. So his inclusion of obscene materials in Ulysses is his aesthetic strategy.